The 2010 Global Information Policy Leaders conference held on January 12- 16, 2010 in Singapore gathered the best and the brightest in technology leaders, policy makers, regulators and entrepreneurs. How this taxonomist managed an invite can only be attributed to sheer luck and moxie. As I sat in the room with thirty tech titans, I remembered the wise words of my father: “It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

Participants included Eli Noam, Professor of Economics and Finance at the Columbia Business School; Cory Ondrejka, Co-founder of Second Life; Joichi Ito, CEO Creative Commons; Joseph H. Alhadeff, Vice President for Global Public Policy / Chief Privacy Officer, Oracle Corporation; Susan Crawford, Professor / former Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy to the Obama administration; Nicklas Lundblad, SVP Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, to name a few. The conference was founded by the formidable brain, Lewis Branscomb whose titles and accomplishments too numerous to mention, and facilitated by the acutely perspicacious Viktor Mayer-Schoenbergerm author of Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in a Digital Age. A correspondent for The Economist, Kenneth Cukier will publish an article inspired by the conference on Feb 28.

Is there such a thing as anonymous data any more? Is an IP address personal information? With the proliferation of new meta-information systems capturing online behavior, how does one protect privacy without squelching innovation? At the end of the five day conference, more questions remained. Inspired by the creation and governance of Creative Commons, a Privacy Commons was deliberated but only about half the room agreed to this recourse. Some believed that the protection of PII would require more than a few nice graphical icons representing opt out rules created by a small group of “technology elites.” A more serious approach of policy, regulatory audits and laws were articulated by others to protect world citizens from exploitation.

My take away: your metadata is the new business model.

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…and riding Segways with the technorati around Sentosa island is fun

Read more from Cory Ondrejka on his blog.

Note to self: read The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, by Jonathan Zittrain (Penguin), and Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting.